The Soul of Merton 4-18-09

Inspired by my readings of "Contemplative Prayer" and "Contemplation In A World Of Action" by Thomas Merton

I'm upfront about it...discipline. I've rarely had it in my life (outside of high school football, and it did do me wonders then), and in my sadhana, in the here and now, when I need it most, I often fail to grasp it, to utilize it for the real purpose of my life, for the cultivation of real happiness.

You could put it simply like this: I don't understand what real discipline is and how to use it. It's so much more than the following of obligations. It is the processes, the forms which we put to our practice that allows us to hook up to our internal link to the Lord.

It's the deepest need of our heart, and our application and understanding of discipline must lead us to think, feel, and act in such a way to as fulfill this need.

Discipline is an essential aspect of the monastic life, and proper application of discipline allows those of us in the monastic order to fall deeply into the realization of our summons and livelihood, as Merton describes in Contemplation In A World Of Action:

"The monk is a man who, in one way or other, pushed to the very frontiers of human experience and strives to go beyond, to find out what transcends the ordinary level of existence...And he feels if he does not respond to this summons, he cannot be happy because he cannot be fully honest with himself. To evade this would be to reject a certain kind of truth, a certain inner reality, and ultimately to forfeit his self-respect as a human being"

In any extended effort beyond the mundane, from athletic to aesthetic to ascetic, we require a exterior discipline to give focus to our internal discipline. And we must not forget the internal aspect of it, lest we become hard-hearted, out of touch, etc. Our discipline must be dynamic, warmly received, and open to change and adaptation to our time, places, and circumstances.

In terms of the monastic application (which is a rather universal application when we get down to the bare bones of it), Merton writes:

"That is what monastic discipline is all about. It implies the cultivation of certain inner conditions of awareness, of openness, of readiness for the new and unexpected. Specifically, it implies an openness to, a readiness for, what is not normally to be found in an existence where our attention is dissipated and exhausted in other things."

Material life in the Kali-Yuga is spontaneous enough, and as we deepen our restoration of our relationship with Krsna and His devotees, the spontaneous factor also increases. In order to make sure that we are in the proper state to receive both of these degrees of spontaneity, we must find the guidance of those who have developed a strong external and internal discipline, so that they may give us the proper shelter for us to do the same.

A sincere discipline allows us to become real before Krsna, without quarrel and hypocrisy in our words, thoughts, and hearts. Merton states this plainly when he writes:

"True discipline is interior and personal. It is something more than just learning a certain kind of conduct and possessing coherent religious justifications for that conduct. It is one thing to say that when I make a profound bow I intend to express love and adoration for God, but another to really grow and develop in that love and adoration."

This kind of sincere discipline is so rare in contemporary spiritual practices, and without it, you get hodge-podge and treading the surface of the water, without going deep, without facing up to who you are and who you aren't, and what do you get? A spiritual life that can hardly be called spiritual, with one foot in the surf, constantly knocked over by the waves of maya that also crash, because we don't know how to swim.

Discipline, in essence, frees up from the bodily and mental platforms, allowing us and giving us the real, tangible, ecstatic freedom that all these poor, sincere dispossessed souls inhale tear gas and take rubber bullets to the gut in order to find and live by.

Without the determined, enthusiastic, and patient development of such discipline, under proper guidance, we will never find what we are seeking.

Merton concludes:

"Finally, discipline means solitude of some sort, not in the sense of selfish withdrawal but in the sense of an emptiness that no longer cherishes the comfort of various social idols and is not slavishly dependent on the approval of others.

In such solitude one learns not to seek love but to give it. One's great need is now no longer to be loved, understood, accepted, pardoned, but to understand, to love, to pardon and to accept others just as they are, in order to help them transcend themselves in love.

Anyone who undertakes to be a monk knows, by the very fact of his vocation, that he is summoned by God to a difficult, lifelong work in which there will always be anguish and great risk. If he evades this work under any pretext whatsoever, he must know that he cannot have any peace with himself or with God because he is trying to silence the deepest imperative of his own heart."

The Soul of Merton 4-11-09

Inspired by my readings of "Contemplative Prayer" and "Contemplation In A World Of Action" by Thomas Merton

We often talk here in the Bhaktivedanta Ashram of going outside our "comfort zone" in order to prove ourselves worthy of the inspiration and blessings that we need to become sincere sadhakas and spiritual warriors.

In a recent class, our wise and fearless guide HG Yajna Purusa Prabhu gave an essential purport to this personal challenge: Our souls are designed to relate, to go deep into relationships, becoming vulnerable, honest, pure, sincere, and determined.

Because we have never been trained how to do this (I can only speak deeply of my own feelings of uncertainty in this department), to make this effort and to clear the muddled path to allow ourselves to reach our natural state of relation and syncopation on the level of Divine Love is a existential task that confounds even the best of us.

In our sadhana, we are given the essential key to opening up the path inward to achieve this state of grace: a constant prayer and meditation that connects us to Krsna in the most direct and palatable way. In Contemplative Prayer, Merton writes:

"Prayer...means yearning for the simple presence of God, for a personal understanding of his word, for knowledge of his will and for capacity to hear and obey him. It is thus something much more than uttering petitions for good things external to our deepest concerns."

To become at all serious in our spiritual drive, we must strive to deepen our conceptions of what real prayer is. We cannot treat our prayers as abstract expressions of our material will. We cannot treat our prayers as daily rituals to be finished on or off schedule.

Observe any devotee, any serious spiritualist, whose prayer is the focus, the calm eye of the storm in the midst of the raging hurricane that is the Kali-Yuga, and you will see someone connected, wireless and flowing to the eternal.

Our prayer, our meditation on the Holy Names, if we can do like this and make it the central foundation holding up all our externals, and allowing it to lift us off the bodily and mental platforms, will allow us to break through to our true identity, beyond our "comfort zone". Merton writes:

"My true identity lied hidden in God's call to my freedom and my response to him. This means I must use our freedom in order to love, with full responsibility and authenticity, not merely receiving a form imposed on me by external forces, or forming my own life according to an approved social pattern, but directing my love to the personal reality of my brother, and embracing God's will in its naked, often impenetrable mystery."

This gift of the depth and breath of our prayer, letting our tongue reach out and even try to taste the Holy Names, feeling it mixed in with the scents of kadamba flowers and fresh cow dung, is a grace that has taken us millions of lifetimes to take hold of.

If we wrap our prayer in the attitude of gratitude, with the soft spice of humility, we will never lose hold of this most precious meal for our soul. Merton writes:

"We must approach our meditation realizing that grace, mercy, and faith are not permanent inalienable possessions which we gain by our efforts and retain as though by right, provided that we behave ourselves. They are constantly renewed gifts...it is never something which we can claim as though by right and use in a completely autonomous and self-determining manner according to our own good pleasure, without regard for God's will...the gift of prayer is inseparable from another grace: that of humility, which makes us realize that the very depths of our being and life are meaningful and real only in so far as they are oriented towards God as their source and their end."

Merton, in developing the realizations of the essential importance of humility, implores the serious seeker to place himself vulnerable and pleading before God, in order to become absorbed in the most sincere and potent meditation. He writes:

"Our meditation should begin with the realization of our nothingness and helplessness in the presence of God. This need not be a mournful or discouraging experience. On the contrary, it can be deeply tranquil and joyful since it brings us in direct contact with the source and joy of all life. But one reason why our meditation never gets started is perhaps that we never make this real, serious return to the center of our own nothingness before God. Hence we never enter into the deepest reality of our relationship with Him."
It is actually as asset of our greatest strength that we can place ourselves before Krsna like this, which gives us, by His mercy, all the creativity and vitality we need to stay committed and caring.

Of course, raised up in our culture of emotional instability, we must try to transcend using this feeling of helplessness to remain hopelessly on the mental platform, over analyzing every little fault of our imperfect character, and overly depending on others to define our experience for us.

Merton demands us to dig into our own hearts, beyond the comforts of our mental speculations and machinations. To do this, we must soak up courage from our prayer and meditation with unfettered determination and desperation. He writes:

"Finding our heart and recovering this awareness of our inmost identity implies the recognition that our external, everyday self is to a great extent a mask and a fabrication. It is not our true self. And indeed our true self is not easy to find."

But find it we must, and we must arrange our lives in such a way, in whatever sacrifices of the nonessential that we must make, to put our prayer, the Holy Names, at the first and foremost center of our consciousness.

The Soul of Merton 4-5-09

Inspired by my readings of "Contemplative Prayer" and "Contemplation In A World Of Action" by Thomas Merton

Out on a harinama, dancing all up on the sidewalks of the Village, blissfully absorbed in the Holy Names, you hope others are also somehow, someway tasting this nectar. But sometimes this turns into hoping against hope...when some unruly Manhattanite pulls up his britches, takes a pull on his cigarette, and exhales with a frothy "Get a Job!"

Ah yes...this typical and time-worn insult is born from the frustration that we, as monks, are not doing our part in the great quilt of society.

Indeed, some people think, that because we have renounced such "normal" occupations and possessions such as employment, car insurance, online video games, reality TV, etc, that we are lazy, no good leechers of everyone who works their ass-like behind off for a living.

They think that because we are not of this world, we are too unworldly. Out of touch, hopeless, and a burden to the capitalist way.

I think they're wrong. You might agree. Thomas Merton agrees, when he writes in Contemplation In A World of Action:

"The monk is out of this world insofar as he is liberated from the routine demands of worldly life. His liberation enables him, however, to give to the world something it needs: a capacity for creating and spontaneous celebration, a deeper understanding, a freer response to the basic existential challenge that summons us to make sense out of our life-to make our own sense out of life. Not just to accept someone else's answers, but to discover by personal experience and to verify existentially the inner meaning and value of human life on earth"
The tradition of the cloistered monk, and his relevance to contemporary times, is one of the main themes Merton explores in his writings. He vouches, in his calls for monastic renewal, for a return to the internal essence of such a "removed" life, but not in the sense of a order of monks completely removed from obligations to a spiritually-needy society, and the personal growth that can come from enthusiastically taking up these obligations.

Merton vociferously denounces such an escape route of immature and undeveloped individuals who choose to hide from reality within monastery walls.

With his own personal example as a guide, he calls for the modern monk (or post-modern monk or post-post modern monk...sigh...its way too many labels) to offer his own depth and clarity gained from his own detachment and distance to mundane frustrations to those who don't have time but sure have the need for such introspection. Merton writes:

"Man has a responsibility to his own time, not as if he could seem to stand outside it and donate various spiritual and material benefits to it from a position of compassionate distance, but man has a responsibility to find himself where he is, namely in his own proper time and in his place, in the history to which he belongs and to which he must inevitably contribute either his responses or his evasions, either truth and act or slogan and gesture...The first thing that the monk can contribute to the world of his time is precisely a perspective that is not of this world. The monk owes the world of his time an unworldliness proper to this time...He is in the world and not of it. He is both in his time and not of it."

We see in Srila Prabhupada's example of this in his, as Allen Ginsburg described it, very intelligent tending of the naive flock of Lower East Side acid-heads and quasi-mystics in the late 60's. Prabhupada's "unworldliness" was indeed incredibly proper to his time.

His "unworldliness" is in fact proper to all times and places, for he brings the message of the spiritual world, our home, to us while we are stuck in a polished series of prison cells, a dreamscape we are convinced is our only and actual place of residence.

In following in Prabhupada's footsteps, we enter into realms beyond the perceptions of most of the "busy bees" in today's world, and one of those rarely-entered realms is our own heart. We make easy journeys to these other planets, these personal internal realms and ecstatic external spheres of Krsna's pastimes and the pastimes of his devotees, to offer to the people what they don't even really know what they're missing.

And in any case, in today's economy, we're not hearing the shouts of "Get a Job!" so much anymore, because the person shouting it needs to find a job himself.

Monk In The City

MONK IN THE CITY
by Chris Fici, NYC, 2009

Living as a monk in the city
I walk concrete, praying for my soul
And yours, to light, to dance away
Tones and basslines, brass and dirt, jazz of the heart

A monk in the city
Thelonious, smoky groove in Minton's Playhouse, fingernails hitting simplicity
Glasses clinking, escaping rat races and red lights
Renouncing the smog and the haze, scraping off the soot
Particles of gold on the black minor keys of his piano
Blue monk, dropping off-beat chords
Pleading for the peeps to awaken, straight with no chaser
To throw off the bills not posted, the unreal dreams, the illusion of body and mind
In the free movement of his finger-joints
Monk is saying, he is living, he is willing Simple Living and High Thinking

A fearless seeker in the city
The Trane, the Coltrane, here comes the Coltrane, 42nd Street stop
From the tunnels of darkness, a Love Supreme
An Ascencion, his gift to us, vibrating Om
His rainbows, his quantum tones, sheets of sounds sublime
Are piercing this mundane prison cell, flying round the rings of Saturn
If we live like the Trane sounds
Like the Trane moves, like the Trane feels
Relentless for the Truth, for the Divine
For the Supreme Truth, the Never-Ending Love
Oh! How our life will shine, transparent souls
Giving our self selflessly, from me to you
I owe my heart's outward bound to the Trane
I'll always ride the Coltrane, going where he goes
We'll meet in the world of knowledge and bliss
Notes eternal, beyond space and time, Divine Love

The bandleader, the heavy hand of the city
Down in the underground, taking the A Train, Charlie Mingus aboard
Behind his big bad bold bass, a whole orchestra of faces and races
Doing big, like the swami said, we have to do big
We no longer have any excuses, we can no longer clown around
Five Spot, Charlie's big fingers resounding feelings of freedom
Souls seeking pleasure, in their natural condition
Ensembles of saints of all colors
Now rises the trombones, the xylophones, colors and feelings of spring
Mingus Ah Um, blues and roots, east coasting
In his large persona, in the moods left behind, we, like the alchemists
Taking gold from the potion, we take his ambition to the stars and beyond
Letting our children hear the music, letting ourselves flow into a new world

The muted horn of the city
Sometimes we feel kind of blue, we need the man with the horn
Like our mood has become a bitches brew
On the corner, 1st and 1st, life is more, it's big fun
Trying to get up with it, trying to get up with the star people
Miles, with his knees bent, sunglasses on, even in the dark basement club
Muse of my creative urge, taking the first thought that comes, shaping it, trusting it
Endlessly evolving
In between the bitter and the sweet of the note of his trumpet, there is the bliss of separation
Lovers, friends, soulmates, here and gone again
In a slient way, on Village sidewalks, round about midnight
Yearning, the only reality of the spirit
From me to you
The Dark Magus, magician exploring the depths of the hidden heart
The hidden identity
Miles, oh my man Miles, Miles in the sky, Miles as the sorcerer
Conflicted man, dualities and strife, the edge to your sound so round

One step at a time
Inside your sound so round the heart of the spiritual man, the spiritual woman
We live wondering where our sweet Lord is, where is the love that is our birthright
Where is our eternal happiness, lost and promised again
Yearning, pleasing in his sound so round, when we will leave this Babylon, and go to the Promised Land

Living as a monk in the city
I walk concrete, praying for my soul
And yours, to light, to dance away
Tones and basslines, brass and dirt, jazz of the heart

The Soul of Merton 3-29-09

Inspired by my readings of "Contemplative Prayer" and "Contemplation In A World Of Action" by Thomas Merton

Recently, whilst minding the wares at our Starving Students dinner program at 26 Second Avenue, I met a young gentleman who walked in a little disheveled, wanting to replace the Prabhupada Gita that had been taken away from him the other night by rough-and-tumble NYC cops giving him and his friends some trouble (and vice versa I might imagine)

In talking to this chap, I found out that he was a refugee of our post-modern mess, an otherwise bright, talented, and seeking young man who is choosing to live in Manhattan as a drifter rather than be forced to take on the drudgery of home, job, "ordinary" responsibility, etc.

In other words, he's taking a bold and probably unwise response to his total alienation from the societal situation in which he is forced to deal with one way or another. In Contemplation in a World of Action, Merton defines alienation as such:

"The term alienation is used of a human being who is systematically kept, or who allows himself to be kept, in a social situation in which he exists purely and simply for somebody else."

Or in other words, as Merton writes:

"To sum it all up in one word, our postulants come to us from a society in which man is alienated, in which he is systematically deprived of a serious identity, in which he cannot believe in his dignity, in which he has good reason to be profoundly skeptical of everything and everyone, and in which he tends to renounce all hope of experiencing himself as real and genuinely worthwhile. It is a society in which he has not much left to resign himself, with a sigh, to passivity with a can of beer in front of the TV."

Ah, I know that feeling all too well...so does my friend, with the difference being that I am taking shelter of a spiritual society, designed to cure one of all physical and metaphysical alienation, whilst my friend instead rides the waves of the concrete surf of the city and its motley inhabitants. I pray he may clean and sober up enough to deepen his sincere desire to associate with our community.

It is our duty to Prabhupada to improve upon our own spiritual society so that we can give real and meaningful shelter to such refugees of our times. In the ultimate sense, we gotta serve somebody, or as we understand, we must exist "purely and simply for somebody else", with this somebody else being the sweet, Supreme Persona of Govinda.

The alienated man of our times shuns himself from such a binding relationship with the other, suffering grandly and minutely from the perverted reflection of this divine dependence. Merton writes on this account:

"The alienated man cannot love. He has nothing to give. Nothing is his. The lover is able to give himself completely to another precisely because he is his own to give. He is not alienated. He has an identity. He knows what is his to surrender. The alienated man has no chance to surrender. He has simply been taken over by total control."

A full and heart-felt spiritual society, in Prabhupada's mold, must have the courage and intelligence to bring these refugees into the fold, let them realize their true identity through the fullness of the devotional mood, so that they can give their most natural gift, themselves, willingly and with full love and knowledge.

Merton, of course, is speaking from a monastic and Christian perspective, but his realization is so deep as to hit to the very simple essence, beyond all externals and lifting them up, in our desperate need to build real community. He writes:

"The monastic life today stands over against the world with a mission to affirm not only the message of salvation but also those most basic human values which the world most desperately needs to regain: personal integrity, inner peace, authenticity, identity, inner depth, spiritual joy, the capacity to love, the capacity to enjoy God's creation and to give thanks"

And he concludes with:

"Our first task is to be fully human and to enable the youth of our time to find themselves and develop as men and as sons of God. There is no need for a community of religious robots without minds, without hearts, without ideas, and without faces. It is this mindless alienation that characterizes the world and life in the world...Spirituality today must be a personalistic...humanism that seeks and saves man's intimate truth, his personal identity, in order to consecrate it entirely to God."